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  “The head cheerleader?” Sophia made a face. “How could we forget?”

  “That’s her.” Kat nodded enthusiastically. “Well, you’re not going to believe this but she got drafted.”

  There was complete silence in the room for about two seconds and then Liv and Sophia said simultaneously, “She what?”

  “Got drafted. I know, can you even believe it?”

  There was no need to ask what Kat meant when she said their old acquaintance from Hillsborough High had gotten drafted—every woman in the room knew about the draft and every one of them lived in fear of it.

  Five years before the Earth had been suddenly attacked. The space station orbiting the moon, which had been completed in 2025, had been destroyed and the rest of the planet was threatened by a mysterious force known only as the Scourge. Attempts to contact and reason with the menacing threat had failed and even the deadliest weapons had little or no effect. It looked like the Earth was down for the count and everyone on the planet was going to wind up as alien take-out.

  Liv remembered those horrible days—it had been forty-eight hours of mass panic. Suicides, bombings, looting and unprotected sex which she thankfully had not personally participated in. With no other immediate family, she and Sophie and Kat had locked the doors to the little apartment she’d been living in at the time and eaten themselves sick on Ben and Jerry’s while they watched a never-ending marathon of vintage chick flicks.

  It might not have been the most productive way to spend their last days on Earth but eating your body weight in Chunky Monkey and watching Sixteen Candles and Pretty Woman beat chowing down on the business end of a gun or having sex with a total stranger any day of the week, in Liv’s opinion. And their wait-and-see approach had been justified—in the end everything turned out all right.

  Because of the Kindred.

  The Kindred were a race of alien warriors, humanoid in form but much more massive in scale than the average human male. They had swooped in suddenly and forced the Scourge to stop their attack and retreat to the far side of the moon. There were rumors that the war continued somewhere in space with scrimmages and battles between the two factions but if so, it was kept quiet. The alien warriors took up orbit around the planet, ensuring that the tenuous peace continued, for Earth at least. And they only wanted one thing in exchange—a genetic trade.

  Because a mutation in their genes caused their race to be ninety-five percent male, the Kindred had become a space faring race, looking for other planets to inhabit and other humanoid species to trade with. Earth was only the fourth planet in their ten thousand year odyssey to offer a viable trade and they were eager to get started.

  Of course the governments of Earth agreed to the trade—what else could they do? The only thing that stood between the planet and total annihilation was the warrior race keeping watch far above the ionosphere, so it was considered best to keep them happy. An all female draft was set up which every unmarried woman between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five was required to enter. It was considered a patriotic duty but also a long shot. There was only about a one in ten thousand chance of ever getting called to do your “duty” which was why it was so unusual to actually know a person who’d been drafted.

  The Kindred pretty much kept to themselves, staying in their ships above the surface of the planet and only coming down occasionally in twos and threes to claim their brides. Nobody knew how they picked them and personally, Liv didn’t want to know. It was easier to pretend that the Kindred didn’t exist, easier to forget that you personally might win the bed-an-alien lottery at any minute. But something like this—actually knowing a girl who’d been drafted—made pretending and forgetting impossible.

  “So what exactly happened?” Sophie had stopped whisking her batter, intent on Kat’s latest piece of news.

  Liv realized she was still gripping the juice carton with the fridge door open. She shut the door and turned around. “Yeah, what happened?” She couldn’t help echoing her twin’s question.

  Kat shrugged. “Two draft officers came to her house and took her down to the HKR building. Then she had to sign some kind of a contract—like a marriage license I think.” There was a Human/Kindred Relations building in every major city in the world built specifically for this purpose but Liv had never been inside the Tampa facility which was located downtown. Just driving by it gave her the willies so she tried not to even look at it when she did.

  “What…which kind of Kindred did she get?” Sophia asked in a hushed voice. The Kindred were split into three distinct branches, all outcomes of their past genetic trades.

  There were the Tranq Kindred—a group of males with piercing blue eyes and a double set of short, sharp vestigial fangs. There were rumors that the fangs grew and they bit when they had sex with the female of their choice and other rumors that they could heal any illness with a bite. Liv wasn’t sure how much of that was true and how much was just media hype but the buzz about their sexual habits had earned this group the nickname “Blood Kindred.”

  Then there were the Twins, a branch of the Kindred in which the males always came in pairs and had to share a woman. No one knew exactly why and they declined to offer an explanation. Some said they were telepathic and needed sex to communicate but that hadn’t been proven—not that anyone had ever gotten a chance to study them. The Kindred as a whole kept strictly to themselves and refused to participate in any kind of scientific research or experiments. So no one really knew anything about the Twin Kindred other than they refused to make love to a woman individually.

  And then there were the Ragers—also known as the Beast Kindred.

  Working for so long in a hospital as she went through nursing school, the sight and idea of drawing blood wasn’t frightening to Liv so the Blood Kindred didn’t scare her. And being a twin herself, she wasn’t terribly afraid of the Twin Kindred either. But the Beast Kindred, well…they scared the ever-loving crap out of her.

  As tall and dominant as the rest of the warrior race, the Beast Kindred were said to have the most unpredictable tempers. Rumor had it that they could go into berserker-like rages when protecting their women, killing anyone that stood in their way no matter how many opposed them. But it was the other rumors, the sexual rumors, which put a lump in Liv’s throat.

  Besides being filled with animalistic lust, the Beast Kindred were said to have sexual stamina unequaled by anyone. Rumor had it that they could come again and again without going soft and their marathon love-making sessions put even practitioners of tantric sex to shame.

  Just the idea of being held in place, helpless, while a huge alien male filled her for hours made Liv’s blood run cold. She hadn’t had many lovers but the men she’d been with in the past had convinced her that sex was like a box of chocolates—you never knew what you were going to get when you went to bed with a man. And sadly, you were more likely to pick the nasty pink marshmallow cream than the yummy nut cluster. So rather than lingering for an indefinite amount of time, it was better to get in, get out, and get on with your life. Cuddling was more fun in the long run anyway.

  The year and a half she’d spent with Mitch had only reinforced her ideas. In retrospect, Liv couldn’t understand why she’d stayed with him so long. His idea of good sex was to get on top and grind her into the mattress while chanting, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” over and over again until she wanted to scream and not in a good way. No amount of tactful hints that references to her parentage during intimate encounters didn’t do a thing for her would make him stop. Finally Liv had given up and just plugged her tiny iPod micro-mini into her ear whenever it looked like he wanted some nooky. She’d even had a playlist called “sex with Mitch.”

  That had been bad enough but at least Mitch had never had the stamina to get through the whole playlist. Liv imagined with horror what it would be like to have sex with a man who could go through the entire micro on shuffle setting without quitting once. Just the thought was enough to send her running